The Forest – Tips & Tricks + Strategies

Tips & Tricks

Note: Credit goes to Ahfuba

Be careful during the day, as small cannibal scouting parties can be regularly spotted. To avoid the natives, make it a frequent habit to stay out of open areas and away from fires, especially at night. The natives are more active at night and will investigate visible fires, despite being frightened by light. Fires alert them to the player’s presence but they usually keep their distance from the light.

It is also worth noting that the natives react to the player’s presence. They will frequently scout out areas that have buildings, traps, fires, and effigies. The more of an impact the player makes on his surroundings, the more the natives will notice. They will also become more aggressive in response to the player’s encroachment: a large fortress with effigies and fires will mean frequent attacks and the appearance of deadlier natives like the spider mutant.

Restore your stamina by eating food, sleeping, listening to the cassette player or resting on the wood bench. You can also drink cans of soda for an instant boost of stamina, however, they are a limited source and should only be consumed in an emergency.

Basic Survival

• At the start it seems best to scavenge everything you can from the plane and the luggage around it and get away from it as fast as possible.
• If you can’t sleep through the night it might indicate that mutants are near your campsite, be careful (indicated by a loud sound).
• It is not a good idea to eat something before going to bed, wait till you wake as you will be starving.
• Always have some extra food left in your inventory.
• Sprinting then crouching will provide the speed of running without the cost of energy. Use it when you need to run anywhere quickly.

Buildings and Traps

• Traps can be reset by using 1 stick and then holding “E” to reset.
• Traps can be triggered accidentally by the player and some animals.
• Effigies scare away enemies, but only when they are on fire, and it is day. They might come back with more mutants though. You can build them via the survival guide, but your sanity must be below 90%.
• The tall huts (mutant camps) on the island can be used as simple shelters by placing a wall with a door in front of them and a fire pit in front of the door.
• The mutants will easily spot big buildings or a fire in the dark.
• If you notice an area nearby your camp that mutant patrols often pass through, build traps in that area. The patrols tend to repeat similar patterns of movement and utilizing this will increase your chances of effectively killing them off with traps.
• If you want an effective way of killing mutants, invest in deadfall traps, they are only cost 3 logs and 3 sticks and deal extreme amounts of damage. If the deadfall trap falls on any amount of cannibals around the kill zone, they will die instantly, but as for mutants, it may take around 2-4 drops of the deadfall trap.

Crafting & Tools

• Spear locations: Near a small pond located on a hill next to a village with three tall huts on the beach or in front of the tent on the beach with the boat.
• Molotov cocktails can be crafted by combining cloth and booze.
• Bombs can be crafted by combining circuit boards with booze and coins, use them to take out stronger enemies.
• Sticky Bombs are highly recommended in order to ensure it will not roll away from an intended target and to maximize its damage effectiveness.
• Sticks, rope and rocks may be crafted to make a crafted axe.
• Do not rely on the Plane Axe for too long. There are various types of axes to be crafted or found.
• Crafting the warmsuit as soon as possible can save the player from a lot of trouble. It can allow the player to stay warm from the cold and forgo building a fire in the middle of a rainy night, therefore, avoiding unwanted attention.
• The crafted bow is a very useful weapon. You may wish to craft it as soon as possible. The components needed are a stick, piece of cloth, and a rope. The hardest component to find is the rope, which can be found in the boat, in Cannibal villages, occasionally in the cave and by creating a rope from pieces of cloth yourself. Arrows will also be required to use the crafted bow, and can be crafted from sticks and feathers. You can also combine 1 arrow + 1 booze to add extra damage to the arrow. To load your crafted bow with an arrow, you combine the chosen arrow with the crafted bow.
• Cloth can be put onto weapons and then lit on fire by combining a piece of cloth with a weapon, such as the plane axe. This is useful for taking out multiple enemies at once.
• You can also craft rope, if you combine 7 pieces of cloth. You don’t have a max capacity restriction on cloth.
• If you are holding a crafted bow loaded with an arrow, you can light the arrow by pressing the ‘L‘ button.

Fighting and Tactics

• Block: Hold “RM” button with a melee weapon equipped to block certain attacks. Blocking at the precise moment your opponent attacks will knock them back, causing them to stumble. A sound effect similar to finishing a blueprint will play if done correctly.
• If only one enemy: Wait for your opponent to run towards you and hit them nonstop until they fall down, then finish them. The player can also sneak behind the enemy to kill them with one hit.
• Mutants will get back on their feet after being beaten if the player does not kill them.
• If you happen to be around deep water, and choose not to fight cannibals, you can lure them into the deep water when they jump towards you and you move to the side, causing them to drown if long enough (around 3 – 5 seconds fully in water) to drown them, same can be done for mutants.
• Enemies can run into fire pits, catch fire and die while trying to attack the player.
• It is possible to hide from the mutants until they go back to their caves, you can even stalk them.
• Avoid fighting with more than one enemy, always use your advantage to survive.
• Stand your ground; If it’s during the daytime, you can stand your ground against enemy patrols. Sometimes they will back off, or give you time to back up slowly. To do this, simply stare at your enemy and don’t move, and don’t give into their false charges.
• If you decide to run away: jump while sprinting and release the ‘Shift’-key while in the air. If your timing is correct you can sprint indefinitely.
• Attempt to upgrade your weapons as soon as possible using feathers and teeth (or booze) along with tree sap. The added damage and speed will make it easier to fight mutants.
• If you combine 1 lizard skin with 15 leaves it makes stealth armor.

Resources and Food

• You can use mud to camouflage yourself. You’ll find it near swamps, ponds and on some coastlines.
• Be careful, not all berries are edible.
• When chopping down trees try to circle them and hit the right spot.
• The skin of a lizard can be worn as armor. Caution: Mutants are not always immediately hostile to the player at the beginning of the game. However, they will take your wearing of armor as a threat and are more likely to attack you without provocation early on. It may be best to wait until they have already become hostile to don the lizard armor.
• Rabbits are a fairly easy to acquire source of food. Try to build a rabbit trap as soon as you have established your camp. Place it somewhere wooded where you often see decent numbers of rabbits scurrying about.
• You can catch fish in ponds with the spear.
• When foods turns black in Drying Rack don’t eat it directly collect it and put it back again in drying rack it will return back to a good dried meat.
• The best animal to hunt for food is the deer as it have 4 Meats on it and easier to hit with weak or upgraded spear.

Various Strategies

Big Fortress

This method of survival is the most obvious. In it, the player constructs a large base with numerous traps, defensive walls, effigies (if their sanity is low enough to access the effigies menu), and fires to keep away and kill as many mutants as possible. It works moderately well but the mutants become more aggressive to this approach: mutant attacks will evolve into small-scale invasions with dangerous enemies like the spider mutant. This strategy takes a significant amount of preparation and hard work.

Stealth and Hiding

This is a much more challenging approach but it can be more rewarding in terms of survival length. There are two different variations of this strategy: Staying mobile and staying far away from mutants.

Covering your fires with wooden walls will also keep them from investigating the lights at night.

The mobile solution relies on ideas of leave no trace: The mutants can’t hunt down the player if he doesn’t have predictable patterns of movement or doesn’t have one single sleeping spot. This works well at evading mutants but makes it difficult to satisfy basic survival needs. The mutants will also not get more aggressive to this strategy.

Distance Solution

The distance solution is the idea of staying as far away from the mutant patrols as possible. The difficulty in this strategy is finding the perfect spot. If the player is too secluded, they won’t have supplies. If the player is in an open area, the mutants will see his fire. The perfect spot is near trees and bushes for supplies but is also hidden mostly from view. There are spots along the coast, especially near the boat, that satisfy these requirements. If you see a nearby patrol after coming back to your base, try to avoid sight using bushes and trees.

Mini-Island Approach

The map is the same, but the spawn is random. If you’re lucky enough to spawn in the highlighted area, you can see a slope and a shore below. Proceed on cutting down sticks and leaves for bonfires and some materials needed for a raft, and cut down logs and push them down the shore for the raft. Build a raft to get rid of the shark’s dangerous jaw. A log holder and a stick holder can be placed on a raft which provides great space and luxury when travelling through the sea. Once your raft is built, go find the nearest mini-island. On the island, turtles spawn in very large numbers during the night, which gives off Meat, which takes a very long time before it spoils.

Also, turtle shells can be made into water collectors, which are the best source of clean water.You can also cook water in a pot and drink it. During the day, collect resources such as logs, sticks, and leaves in the forest, to build a fire during the night and keep yourself warm when it is raining. When nighttime comes, collect meat from the turtles that spawn in the mini-island and cook their meat. This strategy is the most efficient and safest because food shortages will never be a problem, and mutant attack is impossible because mutants can’t swim.